What does the warrior do when the war is over?
What do feminists do when equality is achieved?
Reading through Women’s Studies for the Future, we see Bonnie Zimmerman lay out a vision of what the foundation of women’s studies need cover if it is to in fact be a curriculum of women’s studies.
It must demonstrate an understanding of the ways women’s lives have been shaped by large social structures and conventions of representation.
It must demonstrate an understanding of how women’s intersectionality of different dimensions of social organization (gender, race, class, culture) as concepts and as lived experience identity mechanisms of oppression and resistance.
Some may note the early conflation of woman with the notion of oppression and the lack of focus on self-defining non-referential anthropological examination on what it means to be woman. It reminds me of the Maslow quote, “It is as if Freud supplied us the sick half of psychology and we must now fill it out with the healthy half.”
Who are we if we are not merely “oppressed” creatures?
For women, the warrior question might play out differently: What does the victim do when the oppression has ended? If we are to look at recent history, it might look like “well, like a junkie, she scrapes the bowl for resin” or like a crack addict, she looks for any dropped pieces on the floor until she ends up smoking lint. It is not pretty. She chases the dragon of her victimization to the point of self-destruction.
To watch woman’s nobility feign damsel-in-distress, to live in a self-induced trance simply because she is unwilling to admit the identity no longer works for her, generates pain. Perhaps at one point it was salvation. I know for me it was. I know that walking into my first women’s studies class in the beige and linoleum room that was the activist’s university of San Francisco State was the most intoxicating, the most affirming, deepest state of communion I had known in my 20 years of existing in this particular form, the form of woman, with the slings and arrows, benefits and lack of compass for being what a woman is.
The vernacular, so intelligent, would qualify me for membership in the select group of women who were forging the path for all women, women who were charged with the drawing in and galvanizing our sisters.
The Peruvian women without enough milk in their breasts to feed their babies and the incarcerated women that fell prey to the big bad wolf daddy who promised to deliver the love, the confidence, the self-possession, only to rob her of the fumes she was existing on. We were here with and for the black women who would bring vital nutrients from their ancestors, a love of the phenomenal woman’s curves and the sense of what it is like to look into and be seen through the bluest eye. We rode on Harley’s, our arms wrapped around butch women’s bodies in the Dykes on Bikes parade. We hugged and cried and touched wounds we had never been able to identify.
I wanted so desperately to live in that womb, to remain where it was safe and warm. I wanted to be safe from the male gaze and the horrors of a culture built without the input of women. “Like bears with furniture” was a description one of my male professors gave to men without a woman’s touch. And that was the design of the world we lived in. Left to their own devices, it seemed men would prize utility over art and my nervous system was geared for an altogether more sensuous environment.
Steel and cement, girders and jackhammers, hollow doors and suburban tract housing with fume-emitting shag carpet hurt my sensibilities. Not because I was overly sensitive. Not because I was fragile. But because as a woman with the evolutionary biology, the equipment required to feel the temperature of a child, if the child had just been running too hard, if the cry is for need or for joy – I could feel it.
As a woman, I can feel frequencies undetectable to men’s biology not because I am superior or inferior, but because that is what my particular nervous system is geared for. That is not to say that men cannot develop this quality or that I could not toughen up, tune out, numb out – this is a primary element of my constitution as well. A dog could likely have its hearing dampened but, until that point, he will hear a dog whistle that I cannot. He will crawl under the bed at the explosion of firecrackers on the 4th of July. He is not damaged or hyper-sensitive just as I am not cruel and uncaring because I’ve enjoyed a 4th of July celebration.
The challenge with academia is that the intellect gone unchecked can get profoundly full of itself. That looks a lot like a rapacious drive to control the environment by breaking down, naming, and classifying phenomenon. There’s an unspoken law in academia, a kind of word magic, “if I define it then it is within my sphere of control.” This simply isn’t so. There is in fact a great wonderous mystery, a vast unknowable, at least from the standpoint of the rational mind world of experience. And this is good. Goertl understood well and left us a nice reminder with his mathematical understanding that the rational only goes so far and then the mind must leap into the unknown.
But academicians in the pristine halls and dusty book libraries, womb lovers to the extreme, nothing if not risk-averse. They are the insurance salesmen of reality, weighing and measuring in endless detailed extreme (the weighing and measuring as the place holder of experience) of our shared, stunning, disastrous, at the mercy of the elements, reality.
To know is good. To experience is supreme. Knowing can be a beautiful handmaiden to experience. You want to know that there will be food in your refrigerator when you open it. But you want the experience of ingesting the food and feeling the nutrients dance in your cells, feel the ravages of hunger subside like a wild animal subdued into a purr. You do not want to think about your food – the caloric intake in relation to the Keytone level with the super-food content. You’d live like the Google employees sucking off the tasteless beige Soylent liquid replacement. You could code for days on end. And if you wore a diaper, you would likely not have to get up for twelve hours. Knowing is quite utilitarian.
What I began to appreciate in the insulated rooms of women’s studies, with the soft pillows and non-hierarchical seating in circles rather than rows, was the value of my system. Beauty, grandeur and a felt sense of truth were not frivolous, nor were they childish; they were to the human soul what food is to the human body. And there is no competition. There is no scarcity for position. Yet, when women’s studies turn sour, it is predicated on just such a notion. We lose our intrinsic understanding of chemistry, that two particles are required to collide with sufficient energy and proper orientation.
In other words, this that I am is required in the chemistry of this life. And this that men are is required in the chemistry of this life. I am not going to conjecture on where and how trans and non-binary gender fits into this equation other than to say it is a fascinating question, an exploration that I am interested in delving into. I am, however, going to say that as a biological woman who identifies with woman and who has felt the bruises and wounds of not valuing woman precisely as she is, it is deeply empowering to see the place for my particular biology in the implicate order of life. That who I am just as I am and not in spite of who I am is not only not defective (in other words, I am not a defective man) but is invaluable.
But it also changes the chess board, this realization. It positions me no longer at odds with reality, the patriarchy, men. It positions me as a compliment to. This shifts my task then from warring against or fighting to simply becoming. I am here to become the realized form of the particle I am in the great equation.
And to become resilient, a collision is required. And the truth is white women’s fragility makes us ineligible for such collision. As does our demagnetization brought about by our attempts to fit in to the masculine world by becoming more like men. We lose the “proper orientation” portion of the equation then. Two positive poles repelling each other. The ball buster woman. The outraged woman. But more importantly, the internally desperate and starving woman who wants truly only to be who she is, a woman.
I would suggest then that it is in no way the fault of our forebearers in women’s studies that we ended up a brood of victim-tyrants. They did their part. I was well provided for in women’s studies – well-loved, well-seen, well-educated. Where we went off the rails is that we did not leave the intellectual halls of academia, the great womb, and head into the terrain of actual experience. We tout our bodies, ourselves, but we are the first to eject from them, to reject our sex, our hungers, our sensibilities, to suck it up and suck it in to tight suits.
If I could say one thing to women, it would be “hold your pole.”
The whole of a wildly successful feminism would be where all benefitted, from the frat boys to the Earth, not to mention women who would then have to become who we are, to own our realm, to develop the backbone that can both bend and stand. Do not abandon your post. Do not go passive and get sucked into the utilitarian world. Do not go aggressive and compete for position inside of it. Hold your pole and let the world sort itself out around you.
Jim Carrey, an American actor and seemingly recently awakened human being, said it beautifully when he said, “Depression is your body saying, ‘I don’t want to be this character anymore. I don’t want to hold up this avatar that you’ve created in the world. It’s too much for me.” In other words, the anxiety, the angst, the frustration that is associated with woman might not be caused by “a them” or “a that”; it might be caused by playing a character that is not fundamentally who you are. At the risk of not playing a good woman character, I will say I know that this is the cause. To be woman (and men have their own cross to bear) is synonymous with pretending. The pain is in the pretending. It is not in the fact that our pretending is not working to get us more or better – more rights, better equity, more money, better understanding.
I was part of a quite typical Northern California transformation community. It was filled with the kind of people who sat in the hot tubs of Esalen in the 70’s with Alan Watts and Timothy Leary. People who still made their coffee in battered coffee pots. People who were not strangers to cannabis.
They had a ritual for newcomers to “join the game.” It was called the Perfection Argument. You would argue against your perfection and they would argue for it “for as long as it took.” The tagline said, “and they always win”. There were stories of 14-hour long Perfection Arguments where everyone nearly passed out. The plaintiff was so determined to assert the truth of their imperfection that they nearly wore the judges out.
Alas, when I did my Perfection Argument, I learned this lesson the hard way. The reward for “flashing” on your perfection was a necklace that sat on the table. After several hours it hit me like lightning: “I am perfect”. The realization ultimately boils down to a breaking down of the wall that would separate you from the perfection of all life. I highly recommend it. If you do not do psychedelics, it is as close as you will ever get to the experience.
Anyway, I flashed and then in my meek woman voice, asked for permission to pick up the necklace. They rolled their eyes and howled (they literally laughed at me). Burning, I leaned down, picked up the necklace, put it around my neck and secured the clasp. I rested my hand on my heart where the charm laid.
The lesson was simple. Once you do the work, once you know who you are, you are no longer on the run, a hungry ghost looking for acceptance.
